Julie's Boggle

Something Jonathan finds very hard to resist is following me into the kitchen when I am in it. Even though all his toys are elsewhere and long after he has explored every area of “fun” in the kitchen, he still doesn’t want to go anywhere else!

The things he plays with first are the washing machine – opening and closing the door and putting random things into it – and the plastics drawer – general unpacking, rummaging, and stacking of various containers.

Then follows the dry goods drawer, which he won’t meddle with too much if he’s not bored, and the tray drawer under the oven (he’s quite good about this, carefully extracting the cooling rack and the anti-fat-splatter device from this one and then closing it again).

Another favourite is the pot and pan drawer, and lids are noisily placed and re-placed on the pots which are deemed safe to stay in there. The habit of crashing the lids into the tiled floor was not widely appreciated and he seems to have cottoned on to the fact that if he does that, the entire drawer becomes out of bounds. Clever lad.

He’ll also generally pay a courtesy call to Daddy’s tool drawer, but there’s not much of interest in there and he gets cautioned for touching anything so that doesn’t last very long.

The opening of the freezer is like a siren call. Jon will abandon whatever he’s busy with to come over for a poke around in the cold. He firmly believes that all freezer drawers should be kept closed and makes continual helpful attempts to put them to rights while I’m in there. He’s also getting quite good at helping me to push the door closed (mastering getting his legs out the way first) when we’re done.

The problem comes once boredom sets in. At that point Jon tends to throw caution to the wind and experiment with just about anything. Usually it’s back to the utterly fascinating dry goods.

It won’t be much to start with, just a casual fingering of the lasagne sheets, tweaking pegs and box flaps. This progresses to rougher poking, lifting out the enticing crinkly little packet of baby pasta shapes and shaking it about, or even a big bold move like heaving a bag of something out onto the floor.

At which point, the maternal alarm sounds and Jon is firmly removed from the drawer and carried, bleating, off to his proper toys.

Needless to say, he is back in a flash, and usually straight back to that drawer to start pushing the boat out again.

I’m not quite sure what it is that holds him in the kitchen but I sometimes wonder if somewhere in that fluffy head, there’s the understanding that if an adult is in the kitchen long enough, food will follow…